Empire State Building

There’s loads of cool things to find in Manhattan, but this shot of the Empire State Building is probably the best. The photo is at quite an angle so you can see a lot of the building. Also, over to the West, you can easily spot Madison Square Garden; it’s the big circle.

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When the photograph is clear down to the highest resolution/zoom, you’re looking at an aerial photograph. The very grainy areas are taken from satellite. Satellites can only achieve a resolution of 30 feet per pixel, I believe. The aerial photographs you’re viewing in New York City and the entire state of New Jersey are likely 1 foot size.

Actually, some of the new government sattelites can determine an object the size of a softball.

I’d like to know where you heard that.

GPS devices can determine where you are within a few centimeters because of the coded signal you receive. But if you are trying to observe something from space using only the radiated energy, you won’t be able to get a clear lock on the object. Even satellites that beam radiation to the surface and record the reflected signal are subject to the interference in the Earth’s atmosphere that make what you speak of impossible.

Unless I misinterpretted what you meant, or if something new came out within the last year, I highly doubt what you claim as actually being feasible.

the IKONOS, Quickbird & OrbView-3 satellites can get a spatial resolution of 1m in the panchromatic band, and 4m in the multispectral bands. These sensors are commercial, owned by private companies, and sell imagery..

The gov’t classified stuff can resoove the stitching on a baseball..THE STITCHING…yes, that’s intense…

…oh, but yes, the hi-res imagery on this site is digital aerial imagery, NOT satellite imagery. The imagery for New Jersey is 2ft. resolution taken in spring 2002. Google doesnt allow you to zoom in far enough to realize the full resolution capabilities of the hi-res stuff..

pastanous, how do you know it’s 2002, besides comparing whats-built-whats-not on the images? Is it listed anywhere on Google’s site? I’m just curious if they got them from the same source as the false color images on the State’s site.

What various governments/military agencies can do with their satellites, I have no idea. But very probably they have even higher resolution sensors at their disposition.

Therefore, satellite sensors already come very close to aerial photography nowadays, however without being able to completely substitute it for precision mapping purposes yet.

They MIGHT have used aerial photos in places, but if you care to look in the lower right of the map window, you will see that DigitalGlobe and
Earthsat are credited all the time (i.e. most of Google Map is made up of satellite imagery, incl. the imagery of Manhattan).

(Most of these facts should be easily researchable on the Internet in no more than 5 minutes.)

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